The tortures of the Spanish Inquisition hold dark lessons for our time

In the catacombs of the Bancroft Library, in a chilled, climate-controlled vault, is a 1,300-page document that tells the horrors of Manuel de Lucena’s life and death as a clandestine Jew during the Spanish Inquisition. In black ink on old parchment, scribes some 400 years ago penned the details of his lengthy imprisonment and his coerced testimony, along with the interrogation and torture of other Jews implicated in the investigation.

In the end, de Lucena and members of his family, and countless others, admitted their guilt and incriminated those they loved, and were then burned at the stake.

This grim account is a central exhibit in a powerful new book by Ron E. Hassner, a UC Berkeley political scientist and scholar of the history of war.

Cornell University Press, May 2022) is, in part, a telling of how the Roman Catholic Church, backed by Spanish King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I, used physical and psychological torture systematically to crush communities of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and others seen as heretics.

But Anatomy is also a story of the early 21st century — the time following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq, when a panicked and angry nation increasingly employed torture and justified its cruelty as essential for security.

In probing the practices of the Spanish Inquisition, Hassner makes a devastating argument against America’s use of torture four centuries later. In distilling that story, though, he comes to an understanding that is deeply disquieting and likely to provoke both proponents of torture and human rights advocates.

Hassner is not shy of controversy. At UC Berkeley, his research has focused on religion and violent conflict — religion in the military and on the battlefield, and strife over holy shrines. He teaches a class on war in the Middle East, a minefield of a course, but hugely popular.

In a recent interview, Hassner said he was motivated to write Anatomy by the “the ill-informed and politicized nature” of the debate in the United States. But, he acknowledged, such work is morally fraught.

“There is great uneasiness in studying torture,” he said, “if only because there is only so much one can learn from 400-year-old cases about torture today. The comparison ought to be conducted with extreme caution and trepidation. At the same time … it’s important to place some facts on the table.”

The Spanish Inquisition began in 1478, and for more than 300 years it pushed aggressively to repress what the monarchy saw as heresy. The Inquisition pursued its mandate in Spain, Portugal and across the Spanish colonies, including Mexico. It particularly targeted Jewish “conversos” — Jews who had been compelled to renounce their Judaism and to convert to Catholicism, but who secretly continued Jewish religious practices.

Manuel de Lucena was one of them — a leader in a community of Mexico City conversos who quietly, but steadfastly, maintained their Jewish faith.

Hassner unearthed the story of his life, and his death, during long sessions sitting with the Inquisition’s 1,300-page account of the case. These pages had been written by scribes who attended the torture sessions in which suspected heretics had implicated de Lucena. They attended his interrogations, recorded his confessions and took the names of over 100 other conversos de Lucena accused of joining in heresy.

The scribes had used fine sand to soak up the excess ink on the parchment pages, and as Hassner sat reading in a room at the Bancroft, this sand sifted from the leather-bound book onto his lap.

De Lucena had not been tortured in the formal sense. He suffered no sessions on the rack. But Hassner imagines that years in a dungeon, long periods of isolation and constant fear broke him down. “It was,” he said, “torture in all but name.

Antique engravings offer a macabre vision of Inquisition torture chambers: inquisitors masked in leather inflicting pain with cruel abandon. But Hassner, after reading thousands of pages of documents in Europe, Mexico and the U.S., came to a different understanding.

Yes, the Inquisition used torture — on men and women, young and old. But the torture wasn’t used to punish heretics. It wasn’t used primarily to extract confessions. It wasn’t used as a tool of genocide, nor expressly to break the will of individuals or communities, as Iraq and El Salvador used it in the late 20th century.

Above all, Hassner says, torture during the Spanish Inquisition was not reckless. After building decades of experience, the authorities used torture systematically, almost scientifically. It was, he says, “bureaucratized.”